Christian Palestinian Aramaic

A Late Aramaic dialect (also misleadingly known as Palestinian Syriac) which
was employed by Chalcedonian Christian communities in Palestine and
Transjordan from ca. 5th–14th cent., after which it disappeared. The oldest
texts (ca. 5th–8th centuries) are inscriptions and fragmentary mss. (often
in the form of the underwriting in palimpsest mss., many of which are
connected with St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai).
Complete mss. (all liturgical) only date from the 11th cent. or later. All
the surviving literary texts are translations from Greek, the only exception
being a short magical work. The older mss. contain biblical and patristic
texts, the former often being in the form of lectionaries, whose rubrics
sometimes conform with the old Jerusalem liturgical rite which is otherwise
best attested in Armenian and Georgian sources. The best preserved (though
none is complete) among the patristic texts are parts of Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catecheses, and two hagiographical texts, the ‘Forty
Martyrs of Sinai’, and the narrative concerning Eulogius the Stonecutter
(belonging to the cycle of texts associated with Daniel of Scetis). Other
very fragmentary texts include some works attributed to Ephrem (but which
are only known in Greek), and the narratives of Alexis the Man of God and of Abraham of Qidun (both of which reached
Christian Palestinian Aramaic by way of Greek). There are also fragments of
Athanasius’s ‘Life of Antony’, a homily on the
Prodigal Son attributed to John Chrysostom, various Apophthegmata, and some apocryphal and
hagiographical texts.

Among the later mss. are three dated Gospel Lectionaries, of 1030, 1104, and
1118. The first of these (ms. Vat. Syr. 19) was the first text in this
dialect to be published (in 1861–4). Also from the later period are two
further important liturgical mss., a Euchologion and a Horologion.

The texts preserved in the older mss. are in the course of re-publication by
C. Müller-Kessler and M. Sokoloff.